It covers a number of themes recently discussed on this blog.
My sense is that the MIT-dominated profession has experienced a decline in critical thinking. Instead, once a modeling assumption has appeared often enough in the literature, it no longer is questioned. This creates an element of arbitrariness and path dependence to the professional consensus about the equations used to characterize the economy.
good essay. the making of the economy; a phenomenology of economic science is in a similar vein.
So, what is the contrast with physics, biology, et. al.? Those will have processes with murky underlying mechanisms. They will also have factors that are difficult to control and replicate. They will have model fitting. Difficulty obtaining data, check. Maybe the contrast is that macro has all these things at once making the model the emphasis rather than what is being modeled.